As is known, in recent decades the market for maritime transport of goods increased and directed its logistics to cargo packed in containers, which are used by shipping companies as large transport crates that are rented to transportation users or customers to consolidate freight and standardize the methods of stowage and handling the same in ports worldwide. Similarly, these metal containers usually are directly used on trucks and/or trains to deliver the goods consolidated from the port to customers or end users via ground transportation. The shipping containers have been, therefore, from its beginnings in the early 50s of the twentieth century, a suitable method of transporting over long distances the consolidation and conservation of all types of goods from origin to destination and its use has been normalized and standardized worldwide to ensure the procedures and methodologies of handling them.
These norms and standards set out by the ISO organization have shaped with time the external and internal measures of containers, volume, mass, materials with which they are designed and built, their strength parameters, forms and/or strategic placement of elements of the container for facilitating both the access to the inside and handling by manual operations and/or equipment such as hoists and/or cranes to facilitate and accelerate the stevedoring, embarking, loading and unloading operations thereof.
These standards containers have been grouped into formats that include different sizes and capacity thereof, and have been denominated with a globally recognized encoding that determines the parameters that configure the container fully finished and with all the basic construction details that will trust the container its characteristic of a wrapping or package for transport.
The exponential increase in the use of these shipping containers has led to the need for large storage space for empty containers during the time that these are without relative use or are pending to be filled with the material to be transported.
The large volume occupied by a standard ISO container when it is empty of cargo has required from the ports and/or shipping companies, new investments to grow their storage areas for stationed or empty containers, reaching up to even double the storage areas and spaces, creating a new problem that directly affects the occupation of the land adjacent to ports. Even customers who regularly use these means of transport have also had to enable and increase their storage facilities to support the current stock of marine containers stationed at the facility until loading and shipment.
Also, logistically, shipping companies usually need to get these empty containers through merchant ships to ports with high traffic on export of products and where the containers, once filled with the goods to be transported, are again loaded onto ships to their destination. When these vessels transport containers empty of cargo they have a limited quantity and space, just as if the containers were loaded, since the volume occupied by the containers is identical whether they are full of goods or empty.
To solve these logistical problems there have been many attempts in the past 30 years in order to solve this problem, being by indisputable logic, as a suitable technical pathway of solution, that of achieving a design and construction of a model of disassemblable or collapsible container for use in the transportation of cargo by sea which may significantly reduce its volume when free of cargo, thus reducing the volume it occupies and therefore the costs of storage and/or transportation when empty.
Some examples of solutions in this direction can be found in the following documents: EP0152290, PCT/ES2008/070215, CR91/5935, MXPA/a/2001/003487, ES2335790, EP1851140, U.S. Pat. No. 4,577,772, WO2010104378 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,823,739.
In the most elemental solutions of this type the basic elements of the container, i.e. a bottom or floor, a pair of side walls, a rear panel, doors and a roof, are removed manually because these elements are joined together by bolts or anchorage systems. This leads to the problem of additional requirement in ports of human resources, cranes and/or elevators for handling the elements assembled or disassembled and of times of assembly and disassembly, which are totally dependent from such manipulations, with the consequent risk on work safety and high costs of operation.
On the other hand, mechanically more correct and automated solutions are known for solving the problem, which avoid the complete disassembly of the container by means of collapsing systems thereof, either by removing, entirely consolidated, one of its elements, such as the roof, for then performing the folding of the sides, rear panel and/or doors to the interior of the container itself by pivots or hinges, or else by performing a folding, pivoting or retracting towards the inside of the container without removing any component element but by using especially modified elements to do this. However, these approaches have failed because in order to fit to the design needs highly important standards in the container are changed, such as volume, size or position of the doors, missing anchorages, etc. Every change outside the ISO international standard forces shipping and/or logistics companies to change their handling systems globally, to which they are not prepared. Moreover, some of these designs use materials other than steel for the manufacturing the container, thus producing different results to the standards set out by the ISO standard for mechanical and dynamic response thereof.
In short, the background of the prior art have not yet satisfactorily solved the problem of drastic reduction of space on the storage and/or transport of empty shipping containers with the primary aim of gaining efficiency and profitability in both the storage of containers and transporting of the same to the stevedoring areas when they are empty of cargo and doing so in a way as to conform to the ISO standards in regard to structural dimensions, typical normalized position of the elements forming the container, materials with which it is designed and built, strength parameters and other variables.
Thus, considering the mistakes of previous developments, it would be desirable to provide a container for use in the transportation of sea or land consolidated cargo which besides being completely collapsible in an easy and quick manner in order to reduce drastically and economically the space occupied in the storage and/or transportation of containers empty of cargo, it meets the following additional conditions:                the container must be able to be quickly collapsed, in a similar or lower time than that spent in the conventional operations in a port or ship, without the intervention of manual operation to thus reduce to zero the possibility of a work accidents during handling;        the container must maintain a consolidated structure of its component parts, both when in an assembled or displayed state and when in a disassembled or collapsed state, thus avoiding the manipulation of loose elements capable of being lost;        the container must also comply, when assembled, with all the rules and standards set out by the ISO standards organization, so that users of the same, whether the ports, shipping companies and/or end customers, continue to use the same methodologies, tools, resources, equipment and automation systems currently available, for each and every one of the operations typically performed in the stevedoring, loading, unloading, embarking and disembarking of containers;        the container must have all the elements of anchoring, mooring and handling that are now a standard, so that the way it is operated remains the same as is currently used and the time spent on these operations remains at least the same, whether it is assembled or when it is disassembled;        the container, when it is in a disassembled state, must have simple solutions to be consolidated and stacked using the same utensils and/or tools that are used today;        the container developed, when assembled and ready for loading, must comply with each and every one of the dimensional parameters that mark the standards of mechanical construction of ISO shipping containers and all the anchoring, sealing, accessing and basic elements position norms and should equally comply with the dynamic and mechanical strength tests which are made to conventional ISO shipping containers;        the final economic cost of the resulting collapsible containers and methods of collapsing or disassembling of the containers should not deviate greatly from the cost of a conventional container, or otherwise they will not be welcomed by transportation markets due to factors of non-repayment of the containers; and        given the hard treatment when handling and the continued mobility of the containers, it must also comply with a standard of repair and maintenance which may be easy to carry out and operate (it should be considered that the use of complex anchoring elements subjected to inclement weather, salt spray environment of the seas and high handling cycles, make it very common to have repair and maintenance operations of the containers in ports).        
The prior art experience and background coincide in that until this moment in which the present invention is presented always some of these determinants of success was not met.
Additionally, the new regulations tend to support ecology, the reduction and improvement of the carbon footprint and efficiency of the freight transport systems. It is therefore a further aim to develop a system that by using disassembled and/or collapsed containers as a solution to the transport of empty marine containers, make a significant reduction in the carbon footprint for the life of a container simply and directly by decreasing the number of ships needed to transport the same amount of traditional empty containers to their port of destination.